In Glacier, life is lonely at the top, and that suits them just fine

Hungry Horse News

Nearly six miles into the woods of Glacier National Park sits a small two-story building, alone and stoic on a hilltop.

With an unparalleled view of the Park and the Flathead Valley, the Numa Fire Lookout is perched 6,960 feet above sea level, slightly above the treeline, yet just below the clouds.

In tiny letters on a window muntin inside, a short phrase is written, a Charles Bowden quote scrawled in blue pen.

It reads, "what is explained can be denied but what is felt cannot be forgotten."

With a stick of butter sitting in a skillet and a cutting board full of freshly chopped onions, Numa lookout Lief Haugen was preparing a lunch for the trail crew working near Bowman Lake.

A small refrigerator, a stove and a cot lined the walls of the lookout as a stiff wind blew past, whistling at times.

"I had trouble sleeping last night," Haugen said, peering into the trees. "The wind was so strong it started shaking the lookout."

Haugen, the head fire lookout in Glacier, has been a lookout for 12 summers and has spent eight of them at Numa, his secluded home away from home for five months of the year.

"In my book, it's the lookout to have around here," he said. "Numa was kind of the one I wanted."

The Park has several other lookouts throughout Glacier, and Numa is one of the more scenic, and for Haugen, memorable.

Equal parts historian, lookout and literary mind, Haugen kept his eyes searching the horizon for smoke as he spoke about the history of fire lookouts and the impact of air travel on fire spotting.

"We have eight (towers) in staffable condition, but we only staff four," he said. "Airplanes were the beginning of the end of the old lookouts."

Being a lookout is a demanding job, and one that Haugen said is predicated on communication and safety. With the radio chatter constantly buzzing, any possibility of smoke or blaze is discussed, analyzed and investigated.

"I've had four fires up here this week," Haugen said. "Three of the four were natural outs, lightning started them… There were three other ones that smoked for 10 to 15 minutes and we never saw them again."

During the day, if the wind isn't howling and the sun is shining, Haugen said he will sit on the deck with a notebook in his pocket and just breathe in the scenery, taking notes and jotting down observations.

If he does see a fire, he runs to the fire spotter, which is basically an old compass set on top of a topographical map. He locates the fire through the viewer and lines it up on the map with small wires and then radios the coordinates to the firefighters.

"If you can't talk to people, you can't do the job," he said.

An English major from the University of Montana, his bookshelf is full with everything from Jeffrey Eugenides to Cormac McCarthy. Haugen said that he started doing this one summer while in school and just never stopped.

"I started doing it in college, I just thought it would be neat," he said. "It was a great summer job. I could get ahead on my reading."

Stationed then near Missoula, he said that sometimes he would miss classes to sit in the lookout.

"It was great, I didn't have to go to class all the time," he said with a laugh. "I could stay in the lookout. I just fell for it."

Haugen said that it takes a certain kind of personality to stand the job and the solitude. Shifts generally last 10 days with four days off, but if there are fires burning, sometimes the shifts can last for weeks.

"It's such a double edged job," he said. "The peace and solitude is perfect, but you balance that with fires and storms."

Some days, he dreams of home and his life as a carpenter with his family in the winter, and other days he said he's perfectly content up on the mountain.

"I've got a great life at home, too," he said. "The second you start thinking like that, you have a beautiful sunset. Some days I prefer to be up here, too. It's all kind of a wash in the end. It does take a certain person to be a lookout."

In 2002, for the Parke Peak fire, Haugen said that he was on duty non-stop for three weeks, constantly on the radio handing out coordinates to firefighting crews and watching the fire through binoculars.

Haugen said that every two weeks, supplies will be packed in to his station, usually consisting of food, more books and warmer clothing as the months wear on.

"As cool and romantic a job as it is, when you get into September and October, you get long, cold nights," he said. "Home really starts to sound good."

With his mind, stomach and bank account taken care of with the amenities of the job, he said he gets asked one question very frequently, one that a lot of people wonder about.

How does he shower?

"I used to just kind of spongebath," he said "Then my mother-in-law bought me a solar shower. Now I tell every lookout to get one. You don't think you're that bad and then you take a shower and it's like 'ahhh….' Every Friday night is my shower night."

Despite the weekly showers, the long hours and the extended periods of quiet, Haugen said that he's constantly reminded of how interesting and neat his job is by the people that visit him during the summers.

"Visitors always remind you that you've got a cool job," he said.

Lookout Henry Lawrence, stationed at Scalplock, has been doing the same routine now for 10 summers. For five years, he's been at Scalplock, and the five before that he was at Bear Top in the Bob Marshall Wilderness.

Lawrence, however, took a different route to the tower, making a stop first working on Wall Street.

"I needed a summer off to clear my head," he said. "The timing was right to take that summer off and I've been coming back ever since."

Like Haugen, Lawrence spends much of his free time reading and writing, and is currently working on a manuscript of his experiences as a lookout.

"I'm actually working on a manuscript, a book of essays about lookout life," he said. "It's really about my transition from Wall Street to the Chinese Wall."

For Lawrence, being alone is both a blessing and a burden at times, but can be balanced through his communion with the outdoors.

"The solitude is the best and worst part," he said. "If you get in the right frame of mind, there is no best and worst, everything becomes good."

When visitors trek to the lookout and pick his brain about being alone for so long, Lawrence said he gets a lot of questions about cravings, something he usually answers the same.

"I have very few cravings when I'm here for food or luxury," he said. "Because my soul is being fed. When that happens, then I'm really content wherever I am."